The author of the steamy novel ‘Maestra’ teaches actors the erotic arts
SHE’S penned one erotic novel (the summer 2016 hit “Maestra”) and led a seminar on the unbridled sex of Versailles, France, for a London cast of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”
Now Oxford-educated historian Lisa Hilton is lending her sexpertise to an opera.
“Love Hurts,” playing Friday at 7:30 p.m. at Symphony Space, seems an apt title for a piece about the Marquis de Sade and Gilles de Rais, the inspiration for the French folk tale “Bluebeard,” about an aristocrat who murders his young wives. “It’s incredibly sexy, but it all throbs under the skirts,” the 41-year-old, who penned the libretto, tells The Post. “There’s nothing explicitly pornographic.”
Not that there’s anything wrong with that: Her 2016 psychological thriller, “Maestra,” strayed into “Fifty Shades of Grey” territory.
“I see it as a comic romp, rather than erotic,” she says. “But people reacted quite strongly to the sex scenes, one of which involves an oyster, and there’s a fabulous one on a boat with a hot Norwegian sea captain. When they make the movie” — it’s been optioned by Sony — “I want them to cast Alexander Skarsgård. I wrote it with him in mind.”
Earlier this year, Hilton lectured Dominic West (“The Affair”), Janet McTeer and the rest of the cast of the Donmar Warehouse’s revival of “Liaisons Dangereuses.” The Broadway production of it opens on Sunday, with Liev Schreiber and McTeer as aristocrats bent on seducing virginal women.
“[Aristocrats] had nothing to do all day, so they developed a whole system of pleasures . . . It was a century-long house party, and everyone was having a whale of a time.”
It’s a far cry from today, she says, where “we’re increasingly anxious” about sex.
Except for Hilton, whose 11-year-old daughter is coming to Friday’s premiere. She was conceived when Hilton and her then-husband, the opera’s composer Nicola Moro, were living in New York.
“It’s wonderful,” she says. “Our daughter will see her parents’ opera performed in New York, where we made her.”